Posts tagged Equine Guided Practices

Responding to a combination of serving clients from around the country as well as responding to Covid restrictions locally, I have recently been doing horse coaching sessions via Zoom.

I bring my phone out to the paddock where Blue Angel, my wise old white mare, Derby the mini donkey with the big personality, and tiny black lead mare Cadence, spend their days. Long horned cattle and sandhill cranes laze in the pasture next door. Sandia Peak looms in the distance under the big New Mexico sky.

I have often said that if I ever give up my sense of wonder and discovery in doing equine guided coaching, I should turn in my card. This was when I was doing boots-on-the ground horse sessions with clients. I could always count on the horses to get ...

Here is an idea for a way to share the gift of story this season. It works well in the cozy circle of family that many of us won’t have in person this year. But it also works beautifully in a Zoom gathering!

“Story Seeds” is a game anyone can play that makes spontaneous storytellers of us all. I often play it in my workshops where there are several people, but you could play it with just two people if you don’t have a whole group nearby.......

Patience was never my forte. My fuse shortened even more after I had two daughters who were ten months apart. It seemed that there was never enough time and there was always something spilling, or someone was spitting up, screaming or both were running in different directions. What happened moment to moment was rarely in the schedule I had set up in my head. Stopping to wipe erp off the shoulder of my navy-blue pantsuit before going to work really slowed me down, not to mention made the glam factor impossible.

It’s true, though, that people can change. I had done a seminar that revealed to me in a profound way this fact of life: no matter how I think things should be, whatever is going on is what is going on. Though so ......

There is no living thing that is not afraid when it faces danger.

The true courage is in facing danger when you are afraid.

- L. Frank Baum, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz

Traditionally when we think of courage, we think of a warrior’s courage – bold, fearless, and bigger than life. It’s the James Bond kind of courage, the bungee jumper flinging himself off a bridge, or the kind of courage I mustered when I led a horse packing and storytelling trip in the Wyoming Rockies with seasoned guides Val the Singing Cowboy and his wife Cindy. I had gathered ten participants, and with a total of nineteen horses packing over narrow trails with 5,000-foot drops, we were about as far from civilization as you could get.

You need ......

“I’m going to marry a cowboy,” my 5-year-old self vowed. After all, I had come out of the womb loving horses. How else would I, a city kid, be able to transport myself into the world of Horse without the cowboys I saw on TV westerns like the Lone Ranger, the Cisco Kid and even Hopalong Cassidy? Seeing images of fearless men riding magnificent horses with names like Silver, Loco and Topper, my child’s mind also saw cowboys as the gateway to being around horses. Yes, there were a couple of cowgirls on TV, too, but I couldn’t feature riding a horse in a skirt like Dale Evans, the wife of the “real” cowboy, Roy Rogers.

“Those are culottes,” my mom explained. “A divided skirt......

I've been sitting in the pasture with my horse Blue Angel while she grazes, making it a practice to just observe. None of the horses in her herd have free run of the grass this year, as the farm where Blue lives makes hay to sell instead of using the acreage for pasture. So I take her out to a corner of the property where the grass is lush and sit on the ground while she eats. But sometimes, if the fields have just been irrigated or hay is waiting to be baled, I have to find other places where Blue can graze.

There’s one place by the ranch road among the trees called the bosque where mostly weeds grow. If I look closely among the weeds, though, grass born of seeds carried on the wind from the hay fields pops up here ......

Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

                                                         -- Mary Oliver

As my husband Bill and I drove north from Albuquerque on Interstate 25, the city receded into the arms of the Sandia Mountain Range, majestic and silent to the east.  The freeway cut through vast open country as we climbed steadily to the turnoff that took us onto the winding roads and hairpin turns leading up to Chris’s place. I marveled at the beauty of the high desert dotted with junipers and pinons. As we drove up to the house, I ......

Pay attention! A horse that is loose in the arena is often as engaged in the activity as the horse that is working directly with the client. When I was in Uruguay teaching equine guided coaching, I wanted to convey this with a learn-by-doing approach.

My Proyecto dos Equis team set up a large circle with four quadrants, each big enough for a person and horse to stand in. The activity is called Expanding Perspectives. Each quadrant represents a perspective from which a client could consider a problem.

That day Veronica volunteered to be coached. Everyone else in the course, about thirty people, gathered around the outside of the circle to observe. We had several assistants throughout the arena, and one loose horse, Sarandi. Veronica stood ......

Horses heal in many ways. Just hanging out with horses can be soothing to the soul. Among more guided approaches, there is equine assisted therapy which treats mental health issues. There is hippotherapy (or therapeutic riding) where people with disabilities, mostly children and youth, ride a horse with the assistance of trained instructors. (The riding stimulates the muscular and neurological systems as closely to walking as anything can. Not only that, the disabled person has the added benefit of being in relationship with a horse.) Then there is equine guided coaching and learning, which is the modality I use. This coaching-based approach assumes the client is creative, resourceful and whole, and that there is nothing to be fixed. The ...

Recently I was in a seminar where the question was “What gives you your purpose?” We were to look at what calls us into life. I wanted to say all the things that have always in the past given me purpose: my work with the horses, connecting with spirit, bringing joy, dancing. However, we were asked to look at how much of that came from the past, from a place of survival, from too much thinking, or from some sort of solidified sense of accomplishment. As I stepped into this challenging question, I remembered a Buddhist saying that I’ve had with me since I was in my twenties:

An old man lives in his past saying “Look what I did when I was young.
A young man lives in his future saying, “Look what I will do ......